TRUTH, JUSTICE, HEALING COUNCIL

The Truth, Justice and Healing Council is coordinating the Catholic Church’s re- sponse to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse with a commitment to justice and compassion for survivors. There are twelve members of the Council including men and women with professional expertise in areas of child sexual abuse, paedophilia, trauma, mental illness, suicide, education and public administration.From the Truth Justice and Healing Council blog:

We are now hard on the half way mark of the Royal Commission, both in terms of the time allocated and the public policy and examination work it has set itself.
By the end of the year it will have undertaken 33 of the up to 60 public hearings it indicated would form the examination component of its work.
Commissioner McClellan has indicated that what will surely be the last of the public hearings involving the Church will take place in early 2017.
This hearing will look in more depth at a range of cultural, institutional and systemic issues that have been touched on during public hearings so far but haven’t been the subject of dedicated examination.
The big questions of what it was about the culture of the Catholic Church at the time that led to the extent of child sexual abuse and why it was responded to the way it was will come into focus.
That hearing will likely look more closely at the role of the Vatican in the crisis, issues such as clerical training, the screening of candidates for the priesthood and religious life, the impact of clericalism, the management of offenders and the role of women, amongst others.
There is little doubt that by the end of 2017 the number of public hearings into the operations of the church will leave few, if any, stones unturned.